Theology of Home: Encountering the Divine
on first apartments, creating space, and a plea to Bobby Berk
Hello friends, and happy #TSMidnights release week!! (IYKYK)
Would you believe I’ve not had much time to give to this series on home because I’ve been working on my home? Please send help. I am over it. I am grateful. And I am over it.
I hope you are doing well as temperatures shift and we make our way toward the fast paced holiday season. I wonder if it’s worth considering how to avoid some of the hustle and bustle this year. What can you say NO to that will enable a better YES to something else? I’ll be pondering this for myself, too.
If you were here I’d put the kettle on for you, but since I can’t do that please make yourself a cup of something wonderful while you read. And this is our place, we make the rules, remember? Take your time. This will be here when you are ready. Skip it if you’re not. If you do choose to spend some of your precious rest time with me here, please know how grateful I am. I’d love to hear what you think; DMs, email replies, texts, etc always open!
PS Do you want more Taylor theorizing and reflecting? Because I am GOOD FOR IT. pls check y/n 😊
In the months leading up to my college graduation, I started a Very Important List. I was planning to find and rent my first apartment, the first place I would get to choose for myself. Though I was only renting, I was so excited to set my own criteria and find a home that suited my needs and desires. I was insistent that I needed two bedrooms because, well, I’m an extrovert who wanted to have friends around all the time. All in all, it was a bit shabby but it only cost me $650/month and it was in a great part of town. It had a fireplace I never used but I was sure proud of it. The complex allowed dogs which was very high on my list of priorities at the time. It was located within a few minutes’ drive to the church were I was working at the time.
I bought a second-hand bedroom furniture set that I painted a terrible shade of baby blue…?? I found a table with six chairs (six?? bless my 23 year old heart) that I painted red and reupholstered with leopard print fabric. I hung my prized Audrey Hepburn poster in the living room. I filled the two bookcases I bought from the discount home goods store. The Pioneer Woman’s first cookbook was my exclusive culinary guide. That large dining table was the place I sat to sew a very tatty quilt in one sitting the day I found out my mom was diagnosed with cancer. I remember laying out the squares on the tile floor, crying and so exhausted, not allowing myself to stop until it was finished. I got to put that second bedroom to good use when my best friend stayed with me for two weeks before she got married. I’d like to think we had a few dance parties but honestly I can’t remember the specifics. In those ancient pre-pinterest days, I pored over wedding magazines and made choices for my own spring wedding the following year. I watched Gilmore Girls on repeat. Jonathan, aware of my particular love of green gobstoppers, set up a scavenger hunt with post-it notes the same shade of green which led me to a jar of only the green ones, fulfilling a long held wish of mine.
I was so, so proud of that apartment. Sure, I laugh at myself now. If there had been a Queer Eye exclusively for home design someone surely would have nominated me. But it was mine. I only ended up living there for six months before I moved into the rental house Jonathan and I would share after we got married a few months later. And we were only in that house together for six weeks before we made the sudden move to Kansas City to work and attend seminary. But that apartment on Nicklas Avenue? It was the first place where I got to put my personality and values on display in every room. It was a place of safety that held me on days I felt out to sea. It was home.
It always starts with a list, doesn’t it? When it comes time to move we begin by outlining a set of criteria, hopes written in chicken scratch on the back of crumpled receipts. We consider geography, the size of the kitchen, and whether or not it has a patio. There are the essential categories: size, distance from the places you spend your time, budget, and basic inhabitability. Then we always have that "it would be nice if..." list. These aren't essentials but they are things we know would make our lives easier, or more joyful, or both. A bonus room. A yard. Built-in bookshelves. A bathtub. A tree fit for a tire swing. Land to explore. A fancy dishwasher.
Essentially we look for a home that affords us the space and amenities to live our values most easily. These checklists and desires aren't only practical: they represent the sort of values of we hope to embody and provide the type of environment that enables us to exhale when we walk in our front door. We hope to meet our basic needs within the constraints we have, and we are delighted our dwellings give us that little bit extra. For me it is often a generously sized bathtub, some green space out back, and a living room large enough to set up extra tables for Easter Lunch every year.
In a book review exploring the concept of home, Andrew Davison wrote that perhaps having a theology of home is to think about what opportunities our homes afford us.
“Why not approach our homes asking what the place ‘affords’ us for a Christian life: for discipleship or mission, for prayer or devotion, for health as a human, and health as a Christian? We might turn our eyes, and our prayers for discernment, on what lies outside and all around, not only on what lies within.”
With this view, that desire for a big kitchen isn’t just about storage space or a large enough counter to prep meals with sufficient elbow room. It now affords us space where meals can be prepared, families can gather, and people receive nourishment.
A home in proximity to your community, job, or family shows a desire to remain integrated with those places. A short drive affords you the opportunity to stay involved day in and day out.
My desire for a bathtub is a recognition that I've started all the significant days in my life over the last 12 years with a long soak, and it affords me space to connect with myself.
With the recognition that our homes represent our beliefs and values, every square inch bears possibility for encounters with the divine, others, and ourselves. This is sacred work and deserves our attention.
A book I return to again and again is Domestic Monastery by Ronald Rolheiser. He suggests we take advice from the Desert Mothers and Fathers who said, "Go to your cell, and your cell will teach you everything you need to know." Many saints and devout followers of Christ throughout time have committed themselves to one place for the duration of their life and ministry. Rather than travel all over they stay put, revealing faithfulness through that commitment.
Rolheiser offers this explanation of what it means to stay inside your cell:
"Stay inside your commitments, be faithful, your place of work is a seminary, your work is a sacrament, your family is a monastery, your home is sanctuary. Stay inside them, don't betray them, learn what they are teaching you without constantly looking for life elsewhere and without constantly believing God is elsewhere."
Oof.
I'm learning that finding contentment with my home and circumstances as they are now is the key to having a home which embodies my hope. I'm never not challenged by this idea that my home is a sanctuary, and that by staying inside it, I can learn everything I need to know. In that sense my home does not only provide a space where I can live my values, but it gives me the safety to develop, recognize, and practice them.
There's certainly something to be said about experiencing and learning from a variety of spaces. Anytime I visit a forest or a church or a school or a friend's home, I take away inspiration for what I want to be and sometimes what I don't. However something that I can't get from those experiences is longevity. Eugene Peterson writes about Christianity as "a long obedience in the same direction." This begs the question… what kinds of faithfulness can we observe in the places we reside… the places we stay? What's the impact of seeing seasons change, noticing patterns, and seeing the way the light comes in through the windows throughout the year? Our domestic lives afford us this longevity of formation not easily found elsewhere. Even when your address changes, if you continue to find ways to embody your values in your home the formation happening within your walls can continue.
Of course sometimes our homes do not provide us these opportunities at all. Sometimes we have no control over the location of our home or who we live with or what values are reflected (or missing). Instead of naming hopes for what your home could be, you are daring to pray that things might one day change. Or perhaps your home has faced a drastic change and things don't feel as aligned as they did before. If this is your reality, I pray that you feel the presence of the Spirit meeting you where you are, and that within that sort of "cell," you are able to find a sanctuary, even if it is only within yourself. You are good and worthy of love and belonging. I pray your hope is restored.
Later in Domestic Monastery, Rolheiser writes,
"Spiritual health is very much the task of living the proper tension between... the monastic and the domestic: Where is God most easily found - in the church or in the kitchen? In the monastery or in the family? In a celibate monk's cot or in the marriage bed? At a shrine or in a sports stadium? The God we believe in is both the holy God of transcendence and the incarnate God of immanence. God is, in a privileged way, found in both the monastic and the domestic, the church and the world. A healthy spiritual life keeps a robust respect for both."
Put more simply, God is beyond what we can grasp or imagine. And God is in our homes and God is in the church and God is in the world and God is in each of us. God is above and through and within all.
Having a theology of home does not require you to have a family or even a spouse, or to have a mortgage or to live in one place longer than a couple of months. Having and embodying a theology of home is a daily practice in which we consider how our dwelling mirrors the call and commitments we have made in discernment with the Spirit over the course of our lives.
Thinking theologically about home is an invitation to reflect on how our spiritual formation and beliefs are best cultivated within the walls where we dwell.
I’ve now lived in seven other homes since that first apartment on Nicklas Avenue. They’ve varied drastically but they’ve all shared a few qualities. There’s always been room for guests on Easter. Our bookshelves have only increased in number. Our outdoor spaces have gotten larger. And we’ve always managed to make space for friends to come and stay. To say I’m grateful, even in my occasional discontent, hardly covers it. And… I still need Bobby Berk to come work his magic in my kitchen.
Questions & Ideas for Integration
On your own or in the comments, make a list: What's an important part of your home now or what’s on your wish list? Next, identify a belief or value that is expressed in that desire. Finally, reflect. Is that value rooted somewhere in your faith, and where?
Pick up a copy of Domestic Monastery. You can read it in one or two sittings! And you’ll come back to it again and again. If you want to read and chat about it, let me know? Perhaps we can set something up here to reflect as a small group.
Make a small change: Is there one small adaptation, a baby step, you can make toward expressing a firmly held value in your home? Maybe it’s not quite there now, but what would it look like to inch a little closer? Where can you create space to encounter the divine where you dwell?
A Blessing
In lieu of writing a blessing this month I’m sharing this very fitting poem by a favorite author, found in her book The Irrational Season.
“One night after a small dinner party at a friend’s house, I wrote for him:
Sitting around your table as we did, able to laugh, argue, share bread and wine and companionship, care about what someone else was saying, even if we disagreed passionately: Heaven, we're told, is not unlike this, the banquet celestial, eternal convivium. So the praegustum terrestrium partakes--for me, at least--of sacrament. (Whereas the devil, ever intent on competition, invented the cocktail party where one becomes un-named, un-manned, de-personned.) Dare we come together, then, vulnerable, open, free? Yes! Around your table we knew the Holy Spirit, come to bless the food, the host, the hour, the willing guest."
Madeleine L’Engle
May your home be a space where you and all who enter it can come together vulnerable and free. May you know the Holy Spirit around your table and in one another.
Over to you! What questions, thoughts, and ideas does this bring to mind? I’d love to hear, and I’m here to be a conversation partner if that would be helpful. Talk soon!
If you are craving a DIY partner, e-mail me! 😊
so lovely!